PHOENIX (AP) - A federal appeals court on Friday upheld a judge’s order setting a fast-approaching March 4 deadline for Arizona to revamp or replace a 2006 law and adequately fund programs for students who are learning the English language.

The decision by a three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals backs up an October contempt order in which U.S. District Judge Raner C. Collins of Tucson said he will impose sanctions if the state fails to comply.

Collins didn’t specify possible sanctions, but he imposed millions of dollars of fines on the state in 2006. Those fines were later reversed on appeal.

But the new legal lay-of-the-land now presents Arizona lawmakers _ who already face a $1.2 billion revenue shortfall in the current $10.6 billion state budget _ with a big problem and little time to deal with it.

Some estimates on potential added costs for English Language Learning programs exceed $100 million annually.

With Collins’ ruling in the 15-year-old class-action case under appeal, lawmakers through Friday had taken no action on the English learning issue during their current legislative session, which began in mid-January.

The contempt order stems from the Legislature’s failure to meet a previous deadline set by the judge.

The case centers on rulings that the state has failed to provide adequate funding for programs for students who are learning English and that the failure violates a federal law requiring equal opportunities in education.

In its 91-page decision, the 9th Circuit panel said the changes made under the 2006 state law might improve conditions in some ways.

However, the panel said Collins ruled correctly that the law violates federal statutes by imposing a two-year cutoff on state funding for individual English-learning students and by reducing state funding for schools by the amount of some federal funding those schools receive.

Together, those flaws create the ``very real possibility that the funding scheme may trigger federal enforcement action’’ that could ``retard or reverse whatever progress has been made,’’ the ruling said.

Still, the law’s reliance on providing schools with additional English Language Learning funding based on costs to implement new state-approved instruction models could provide a rational basis for funding, the decision added.

Currently, the state provides schools with supplemental per-student funding for ELL programs in amounts that critics contend are severely inadequate.

If the flaws identified by Collins are fixed, there is reason to hope ``that this dispute, which has been in the courts longer than it takes a student to go from kindergarten to college, may finally be nearing resolution,’’ Judge Marsha S. Berzon wrote in the ruling.

Republican lawmakers who drafted the 2006 law contend it should solve any inequities in ELL funding because the state would provide dollars according to districts’ actual costs for their ELL programs.

But numerous school district superintendents recently trooped to the Capitol to complain to legislators that the state’s formula to fund the models won’t provide enough dollars to cost actual costs.